The legal services environment is undoubtedly undergoing radical changes, and lawyers need to know how to build sustainable and competitive legal enterprises that can dominate the new market for legal services- the future of legal services.

There is a rapid evolution in the legal market and there are various forces and trends driving the changes in this environment. Also, the way that legal services are delivered is fast changing due to advances in technology and business model innovation.

This era of rapid disruption has resulted in a gradual shift towards the future of affordable, standardized services and efficiencies in how law firms deliver services. The disruption in the legal industry has led to more insourcing of legal work, clients’ use of technology tools that reduce the need for lawyers and paralegals and a situation where non-law firms provide legal and quasi-legal services.

The future of legal services is expanding as clients are demanding efficient, predictive, cost-effective, accessible, scalable, and agile delivery of legal services. This is incredibly giving rise to the future of legal services.

Let’s examine a few profitable opportunities technology offers to the future of law:

1. Creation of new legal services. Technology may well be taking market share for legal work at one end of the market – online legal services for example.  Legalpedia says some law firms will react by tapping technology to find more efficient ways to serve the market.  However, the breakthroughs – the winners as the report calls them – will come from those firms that find ways to leverage technology to create new services.

Others will bring disruption in-house by hiring or acquiring talented technologists and their intellectual property. Firms will also discover entirely new forms of practice, like computer-assisted law, that can only be pursued in this technological environment.

 

2. Borderless Society- There is data to suggest a global opportunity.  For example, the Global 500 has grown approximately 8% in over the last several years. The use of technology and artificial intelligence to help lawyers in legal processes is growing rapidly. This will help lawyers deliver more efficient and timely services to clients in the future.

Technology will be used to capture and analyze data and give better information to clients. It can also be used to deliver low-cost document review services. Lawyers are increasingly able to rely on a host of digitized programs to perform a variety of legal tasks.

Firms will employ technologies to help them rapidly understand how a transaction might play out across all possible jurisdictions. Then, crucially, they’ll use their human ingenuity to craft offerings that transcend jurisdiction, maximizing clients’ freedom to act across the globe in real time.

3. Delivery of legal services through a collaborative mix of lawyers, knowledge engineers, innovation specialists, legal tech experts, and marketing and business professionals will help clients to achieve their corporate goals by delivering empathetic user-centric legal solutions.

These new positions will organically increase firms’ intellectual and demographic diversity. Firms that adopt more flexible work practices and pay structures will be best prepared to compete with other industries for the capable people needed to fill these new jobs.

 

Globalisation has played a critical role in defining the future outlook of legal services as this would enable them to provide legal services to multinational customers. To prepare lawyers for this, continuous legal education and training should be standardized and adopted worldwide to accommodate the new approaches to the delivery of legal services.

Finally, very few would dispute that law is a business built in many ways on relationships – and by extension superior customer service. Legalpedia advocates thinking beyond responsiveness and in place foreseeing the future needs of clients.

Firms will fortify relationships with clients not only through great customer service but by using everything they know about them to anticipate their future needs.

P.S. 

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REFERENCES

https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2018/12/20-important-legal-technology-developments-2018.html

https://www.ibanet.org/Article/NewDetail.aspx?ArticleUid=A407B3E1-7083-48C2-AD9A-6BE7B7C934C5

Blane Prescott, ‘5 Top Trends Impacting the Legal Profession Now’ American Bar Association [October 2019] https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/publications/youraba/2019/october-2019/a-management-consultant-on-how-to-navigate-5-trends-buffeting-la/ accessed 9 May 2020.

Jordan Furlong, ‘Strategic Analysis of the Global Legal Market: Envisioning the Future of Legal Services’ Law21 [2016] www.law21.ca/about accessed 9 May 2020.

Shay Namdarian, ‘7 Leaders Share Their Thoughts on the Future of Legal Services’ Collective Campus www.collectivecampus.io/blog/7-leaders-share-their-thoughts-on-the-future-of-legal-services accessed 9 May 2020.

Mark A Cohen, ‘How Will Legal Education and Training Keep Pace with Change? Forbes [10 September 2018] www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen1/2018/09/10/how-will-legal-education-and-training-keep-pace-with-change/#7f9b2a7b7055 accessed 9 May 2020.